Democracy and authoritarianism
"America stands at a crossroads between democracy and autocracy, and the split is about 50/50."
Constance Hilliard
Today's Guest Post argues that it has always been that way, back to the beginning.
College classmate Constance Hilliard sent me an email that caught my attention. It was on a subject this blog addresses frequently, the struggle between democracy and authoritarianism. She said that Trump's authoritarian is nothing new in America. A significant number of Americans have never accepted the idea that all people were created equal or should have equal economic, social, or legal status. An autocratic governance preserves inequality. Democracy puts it at risk.
I had primarily understood Constance Hilliard to be a student of history and genetics, particularly as they relate to Americans of African heritage. She earned a Ph.D. from Harvard in African history and Semitic historiography. She is a professor of evolutionary African history at the University of North Texas.
She devoted her early career to tracking down and translating handwritten manuscripts from Timbuktu and other centers of learning in the region known as the Western Sudan (modern day Mali, Northern Nigeria and Chad). Her interests evolved.
She pioneered a sub-field of ancestral genomics. This methodology brought answers to some of the most troubling and persistent health issues in the African-American community. This group suffers a 75% rate of hypertension, which all too often led to kidney failure. Her research showed that their ancestors occupied the deep interior of West Africa, known to be one of the most sodium-deficient regions in the world. These communities evolved gene variants that allowed their kidneys to function on 200 mg/sodium/day. However, in the U.S., African-Americans consume the national average amount of salt, 3,400 mg/sodium/day. No wonder they struggle with chronic diseases tied to sodium metabolism: They consume 17 times the amount consumed by their ancestors. She told me her research led her to examine other genetic maladaptations. These include new details about the low rates of osteoporosis in Black Americans and their high risk of some aggressive cancers related to calcium over-consumption in ancestral environments.
Guest Post by Constance Hilliard
Democrats are not too smart. We live in a fantasy world of our own making. My view is that America stands at a crossroads between democracy and autocracy, and the split is about 50/50. As to how we got here, that is easy. We never stepped away from it. In two-and-a-half centuries we haven’t budged a bit. Of course there have been all manner of social changes in our society. But what didn’t change was the fact that the democracy advocates shared power with the authoritarians. And sometimes the latter even took the lead. How else would we have ended up behaving in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, like a slightly more charitable version of Putin?
The democracy created by our founding fathers was a beautiful construct, in an artistic and intellectual, rather than realpolitik sort of way. The half of the American population that never believed in representative government or even the rule of law lived off slavery for half our history. Their privileges were protected. The South in fact won the Civil War with no land redistribution for the former slaves, with Jim Crow, lynchings, and discrimination within every sector of society.
The only reason we’re now faced with Trumpism and the anti-science craziness of right wing Christians is because, as with the Civil War, our authoritarian side is horrified by the prospect of their white privileges fading into egalitarianism. Having a Black president woke them up. But we Democrats on the other hand pretend that our democracy is so solid that we should keep pushing for bipartisanship with fascists.